Re:PostGIS 2.5.0 released
by giancarlostoro on Monday September 24, 2018 @08:27AM
(#18057087)
I sort of hope GeoJSON takes off a bit more, it just seems easier to work with at the very minimum with things like Leaflet. Of course you have Bing which uses their own objects for their latest rendition of the Bing Maps v8 JS API. Thankfully using Leaflet we were able to use their imagery instead. Having dealt with Shapefiles I can say it definitely felt like dealing with something quite dated, especially compared to how much simpler JSON can be.
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Everybody is hoping something other than shape files eventually takes off, as its's universally agreed to be a pretty terrible format. The problem is that the industry hasn't unified around a single format with GeoJSON, GeoPackage and to a lesser extend KML all trying to become the next shape file.
As it stands however, everybody and everything can read shape files and that cannot be said about any other format.
The real annoying thing is that one of the reasons shapefiles are so bad, and so hard to replace is they fill a bunch of niches in a half assed way and no sane replacement format is going to replace shapefile in all situations.
Need a standardized way to disseminate data that's super easy to ingest? GeoJSON and KML work great there, while GeoPackage is going to be not a great fit for things like APIs plus you can't do a streaming read.
Need a way to edit and work with data locally and maybe send stuff around your office? Geopackage is going to be a much better fit then GeoJSON or KML.
Another 'hidden' feature of shape files that I've seen regularly abused (and abused myself more than once) is that they use the standard dBASE format to store their data. Meaning that all kinds of apps that know nothing about shape files (like Excel or Access) can be used to read and analyse the data stored within them.